Online traffic is a precious commodity among web advertisers and promoters. For one, increased net traffic often translates directly into increased revenues for websites that engage in the sale of goods and services. Second, many websites that provide information but do not engage in sales generate their revenues by charging for advertising space on their webpages. Examples include search engines and “blog” websites. These websites usually charge advertisers by the number of clicks on the advertisers' links. For these websites, web traffic has a two-prong importance. First, a threshold amount of online traffic must be achieved before an advertiser will agree to advertise on that website. Second, once an advertiser has been retained, the amount of traffic directed to advertiser websites directly translates to how much advertisers will pay. Third and finally, for many infant websites that largely depend on user-provided content, such as discussion forums or social networking tools, it is paramount to achieve a critical mass of online traffic in an early stage in order to go forward. At these websites, the more visitors there are, the more attractive the website becomes to other visitors. For example, most new auction websites will not be able to compete successfully against eBay because it is very difficult to achieve the initial critical mass. Buyers and sellers prefer to visit eBay because it is much easier to find other buyers and sellers there. Thus, how to effectively generate, attract, and retain online traffic is a challenge faced by many websites owners and administrators.
Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo! and other news and information web sites attempt to drive traffic to third party web sites by providing banner ads, ordered search results, and click-through advertising. However, the effectiveness of these types of ads in actually generating traffic can be limited. For example, many users do not pay much attention to banner and click-through ads, and quickly focus on other displayed content that interests them. Moreover, clicks on ads provided by search engines or other websites are often accidental or fraudulent, and do nothing in themselves to encourage users to spend any time on the associated site.
Meanwhile, some other existing “Get Paid to Surf” products and services attempt to drive traffic to specific sites on the Internet by rewarding users with real-world discounts, frequent flier miles, cash, or others. These products typically operate on an accumulated point system. One example of this type of prior art reward program is U.S. Pat. No. 6,749,511, which discloses a website promotional process. It requires a user to visit a host site and then browse through a plurality of advertiser or affiliate sites whose hyperlinks are provided at that host site to find and match a number of embedded indicia. It further requires the indicia to be embedded within the advertiser or affiliate sites that are promoted by the host site. A prize is rewarded if the participant finds a sufficient number of matching indicia within a designated time period.
One major disadvantage of these “reward” products is that they lack entertainment value and thus fail to retain user interest, even though sometimes they are described as “games.” These “rewards” such as points or currency typically have no entertaining features themselves such as visual art, animation or sounds. Furthermore, they do not provide the users with any special abilities or powers that could be used in an online game, and they provide no other decorative or personalizable value for the user. Moreover, similar to the on-line advertising services described above, they do not effectively reward users for activities that actually promote and create revenue for the advertising sites.
Another major disadvantage with these point-based products is that the points lack the ability to be associated with brands or advertisers' products. The generic reward units, such as points or miles that a user collects from different websites, cannot be made different from one another. Ten points earned from visiting website A is no different than ten points earned elsewhere. It would be desirable if different rewards could be configured to possess unique properties associated with a certain name or brand or product. An advertiser or affiliate could then give to users who visit their websites Virtual Collectibles that possess special properties that promote their brands, services or goods.
A further disadvantage, exemplified by the above-identified patent among others, is that reward program advertisers or affiliates must, in addition to paying a fee to the host site, provide support within their websites of content needed to support the accumulation of points and rewards (i.e. indicia such as a JPEG file with a predetermined filename and located at a URL associated with a sponsor). This is intrusive and burdensome on such organizations. Moreover, participants must allow cookies to be stored on their computers, which not all participants are willing to do and/or which can be easily disabled or defeated.
Co-pending U.S. application Ser. No. 12/037,019, commonly owned by the present assignee, the contents of which being incorporated herein by reference in their entirety, dramatically advanced the state of the art by providing a method and apparatus for distributing virtual objects such as Virtual Collectibles. According to an aspect of the co-pending application, users can accumulate Virtual Collectibles in the process of casually surfing the web. The system detects what site(s) the user is visiting and determines whether to reward the user with a Virtual Collectible when the user enters or links to a predetermined URL, such as the URL of a partner website. By entertaining the user in the process of visiting a partner website, the user is more likely to remember and favorably view the partner and its products and services.
Although this functionality by itself vastly improves upon conventional means of promoting on-line activities, additional improvements are possible by further leveraging the discoveries and functionalities of the co-pending application, including improvements that even further overcome the above-described and other disadvantages.